Posts Tagged ‘clashes’

Nearly all of the Hamas leadership in Judea and Samaria is now in the hands of the IDF. In the process, a Palestinian Authority unity government Arab died at dawn in clashes at Jelazoun, north of Ramallah, but it is not clear whose bullet ended his life.

The Bethlehem-based Ma’an news agency reported the 20-year-old man was taken to hospital with “a bullet in his chest” but failed to mention whether the bullet was from a terrorist’s gun or that of the IDF. Two other rioters were also wounded, according to the report. The man had been one of the rioters trying to prevent IDF soldiers from their house to house search for three teenage yeshiva boys kidnapped by the terrorist group last Thursday night. The soldiers were also arresting Hamas members during the operation, which took place overnight throughout Judea and Samaria.

Nearly all of the Hamas leadership in Judea and Samaria is now in Israel’s custody, with some 150 arrests having been made over the past 48 hours. The IDF allegedly used explosives to blow open the door at one house in Hevron; two arrests were made in that incident.

Arabs also attacked Jews as they were walking back from a mass prayer rally at the Western Wall Sunday evening, singing songs of faith as they passed through the alleys of the Old City of Jerusalem. The mob of Arabs hurled rocks and chairs at the Jews, screaming and cursing at them, attempting to block them from moving forward until police arrived to break up the confrontation. A video of the attack can be seen on the Arutz Sheva website.

Arab attacks on Jews in and around the Old City and on routes to and from the Western Wall are becoming increasingly more common: an American tourist who asked not to be identified told The Jewish Press that her visit to the sacred site on Friday night was marred by a what she called a similar “unpleasant incident.”

The woman, accompanied by an Israeli friend, was on her way to the Western Wall when a group of Arab teenage boys “bumped into us, deliberately getting between us, smoking cigarettes and looking very insolent. They went out of their way to get into our way,” she said, “and then looking to see what we would do about it, if anything. I am a New Yorker so I just kept walking. But it was not pleasant and it’s never happened before. I thought it was very odd.”

On Sunday night, PUG Arabs also opened fire in a drive-by shooting at an IDF checkpoint protecting the entrance to Jerusalem on the Gush Etzion tunnel road. No one was injured in the shooting, which took place on Highway 60 near the Arab village of Walleja. Five bullet casings were later found near the site of the incident.

Two of the kidnapped yeshiva boys — Gilad Sha’ar and U.S.-born Naftali Frenkel are age 16, and Eyal Yifrach is 19 years old. All three learn at the Mekor Chaim Yeshiva in the Judean community of Kfar Etzion in Gush Etzion. They were traveling to their homes for the Sabbath when they were kidnapped. One managed to call police at 10:25 p.m. to let them know they had been grabbed by terrorists before their cell phones were cut off, police said Sunday night.

By early Sunday, some 80 Hamas members and more than a dozen Islamic Jihad terror suspects had been rounded up for questioning in the search for the missing teens. Overnight Sunday night, another 50 Hamas and Islamic Jihad members were taken into custody.

Separatist fighters in the eastern Ukraine region of Donetsk confirmed Thursday they are holding four missing observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe as hostages.

The pro-Russian rebels also shot down a Ukrainian government military helicopter Thursday during heavy clashes around the city of Sloviansk – located in the northern part of the Donetsk province — killing 14 people. Among the dead was General Volodymyr Kulchitsky, the BBC reported. The rebels allegedly used a Russian-made anti-aircraft system.

There has been heavy fighting over the past several weeks in the area, located about 100 miles (160 kilometers) from Ukraine’s border with Russia.

According to reports by the Associated Press, residents in Sloviansk – a hotbed of separatist forces — have been regularly shelled with mortar fire by government forces. Civilian casualties have been high, and some residents are fleeing, according to the reports.

The Jewish Agency for Israel evacuated a couple with two twin baby girls from the city of Donetsk (capital of the province) and another couple from the city of Mariupol, south of Donetsk city, out of Ukraine in a rescue operation earlier this week. The six were already set for aliyah, but the decision to rescue them was made due to the fierce battle that started over the Donetsk airport between Ukraine’s army and pro-Russian militants. They traveled overland to the Kiev airport and then flew from there on to Israel.

Police shot and killed two three protesters in violent clashes on Wednesday between stick-wielding demonstrators and security forces in Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine. A third protester died after a fall.

Prime Minister Mykola Azarov blamed the deaths on opposition leaders and claimed that the police did fire live bullets.

The violence escalated after three days of protests over the two-month-old political crisis, which worsened when President Viktor Yanukovych changed course from an expected signing of a long-anticipated cooperation deal with the European Union.

The clashed were sparked by his success in passing legislation against protesters.

After crushing the Muslim Brotherhood at home, Egypt’s military rulers are going after Hamas in the Gaza Strip, senior Egyptian security officials told Reuters on Tuesday. Now they go about toppling Hamas, which took over in Gaza in 2007.

Last month, Egypt’s public prosecutor accused Hamas of conspiring with the Brotherhood and Iran to launch terrorist attacks in Egypt.

“We know Hamas is the Brotherhood and the Brotherhood are terrorists and no country could develop with terrorists in or around it,” the security official said.

Wait – is anybody writing this down? Someone should tell Bibi that the Egyptians have finished reading his book and are now busy applying his ideas. The good ones, before he turned his back on them.

Since rising to power in a military coup in the summer, the Egyptian junta has been laboring to undermine Gaza’s economy by destroying the bulk of the 1,200 tunnels used to smuggle food, cars and weapons. In that area, too, Egypt has been a lot more heavy handed than the IDF. Essentially, using a team of bulldozers, the Egyptian army, over a period of ten days or so, razed everything that stood up alongside the Gaza border up to where the Israeli border begins. They created a broad no man’s land over the caved in tunnels, making passage into their side a life threatening proposition.

Egypt’s Junta has cracked down hard on the Brotherhood, to the point where nowadays almost its entire leadership and thousands of its rank and file members are behind bars.

And so, today, while Egyptians continue to vote on the first day of polling in the constitution referendum – their junta’s first electoral test since Mohamed Morsi’s ouster in July; and while as many as nine Egyptians have already been killed in local clashes, the new Pharaohs are setting their sights on another target.

“Gaza is next,” one senior security official told Reuters. “We cannot get liberated from the terrorism of the Brotherhood in Egypt without ending it in Gaza, which lies on our borders.”

It looks like Hamas will be facing growing resistance and street protests, much like those that took down two consecutive regimes in Egypt (until the junta got it right). The rulers of Cairo will be financing and supplying these protests, until Hamas cries uncle and takes a boat ride to Turkey.

Assuming they’ll still have friends up there by that time.

Egypt does view Hamas as an existential problem, seeing as the terrorist government has been supporting al Qaeda-inspired gangs that attack security forces in the Sinai peninsula. According to Reuters, those attacks have longs since crossed the Suez Canal and spread to Egypt’s large cities.

A Hamas official said the comments made to Reuters by Egyptian officials “showed Cairo was inciting violence and trying to provoke chaos.”

Yes, I admit, some news items are more fun to write than others. This one – top ten.

The Hamas forces are estimated at 40,000 soldiers, police and security forces. They rule over a population of 1.8 million people, if any of those numbers can be trusted.

“We know that Hamas is powerful and armed but we also know that there are other armed groups in Gaza that are not on good terms with Hamas and they could be used to face Hamas,” another Egyptian security source told Reuters. “All people want is to eat, drink and have a decent living, and if a government, armed or not, fails to provide that, then the people will rise against it in the end.”

And, naturally, the more people starve, the easier it will become to lure them out into the streets, at which point the Hamas thugs will crack down on them, cameras will snap, mayhem will erupt, until something will give.

On Saturday, Israel’s Bedouin community declared a “Day of Rage” to protest the government’s intent to hand over to them only part of the Negev, based on the Government’s Prawer-Begin plan, which takes back some land from squatters.

The main rallies took place in Haifa, where hundreds of hooligans blocked traffic, burned tires and threw rocks at police. They injured at least ten police, including the chief of the Coast District and the spokesperson for the Negev District. Police responded with shock grenades and with quite brutal crowd control measures.

There was another Arab demonstration outside the Shchem gate in East Jerusalem. Dozens of Arabs threw rocks on police there as well.

The signs being carried in those rallies threatened that should the Bedouins not receive better than half the Negev, they’d start a third Intifada.

It’s what they do.

The Prawer Commission, chaired by Ehud Prawer, Benjamin Netanyahu’s director of planning, found, back in 2011, that an estimated 50% of unrecognized Bedouin villages were built within Jewish planning areas. It recommended that the inhabitants of these villages, some 30,000 Bedouin invaders, entering Israel illegally from the vast Arabian deserts over the past six decades—about 40% of the total unrecognized Bedouin population—should be relocated to the seven existing government built Bedouin townships.

The commission proposed compensation payments to the evacuees, between $1.7 billion and $2.4 billion, including $365 million for expanding the approved townships. The compensation would be reduced to zero over a period of five years and if agreement had not been reached the land would be considered forfeited.

Then, in January, 2013, Israel’s government approved the recommendations of then Minister without portfolio Benny Begin, backed by AG Yehuda Weinstein, to change the program.

Benny Begin’s “stinking maneuver” not only confirmed through legal registration what has been essentially an illegal land grab of many thousands of acres by the Bedouins over several decades, but also promised them many new settlements to boot.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud-Beitenu was so committed to this move, that they forced Jewish Home, their National Religious partner, to approve in the coalition agreement item 51 which reads: Both sides will promote the “Law regulating Bedouin settlement, 5772-2012,” should a Jewish Home minister be a member of a ministerial committee to implement said law.

Please don’t forget, it’s a crucial detail: Both Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman supported the Benny Begin plan that gave more than half the Negev to Bedouin invaders.

But Jewish Home and Yesh Atid, together with most of the rank and file coalition members, managed to introduce significant changes to the Begin plan, after it had already been approved by the transitional government after the election. The change, essentially, eliminated the Begin plan in favor of the original 2011 plan, which was approved a much less generous land giveaway to the Negev Bedouin.

MK Ahmed Tibi said the Prawer plan is tragic, since it removes civilians from their land.

By civilians Tibi means Arab civilians, because he had no problem at all approving the forcible removal of thousands of Jewish civilians from Gaza and from Samaria.

Tibi also made sure the press understood he was not behind the violent clashes with police, since, as he put it, “we object to violence, but we are in favor of rage.”

It’s that kind of subtlety that we need more of in mass public demonstrations.

The Jewish Left is united in calling on the government to reward the violent demonstrators by freezing the Prawer plan.

And Avigdor Lieberman, who initially approved the Begin land grab, now compared the confrontation with the Bedouins the historic Jewish reclamation of land in Zion over the past century and a half.

Deadly clashes erupted in Cairo on Sunday as pro-Morsi marches protesting the military junta rule headed to Tahrir Square, where thousands were cheering the same junta, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the army’s 1973 “victory” against Israel.

Confrontations there and outside Cairo resulted so far in the death toll rising to 51, according to Al Ahram, with 268 injured.

Egypt’s Interior Ministry said security forces arrested 423 people during clashes in Cairo and Giza.

The National Alliance to Support Legitimacy, a coalition of Islamist forces supporting deposed president Mohamed Morsi, said at least 11 had been killed in clashes with security forces in Ramses Street in central Cairo.

Official news agency MENA also reported that gunshots were heard amidst the clashes on Ramses Street.

Backers of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood have staged thousand-strong marches in several parts of Cairo, Giza and other governorates, Al Ahram reported.

Rallies took a violent turn in central Cairo’s Garden City and Giza’s Dokki district, where police fired rounds of teargas after local residents clashed during pro-Morsi protests heading towards Tahrir, eyewitnesses and Ahram Online reporters said. The sound of heavy gunfire was later reported, as well as army jets and F-16 fighters hovering in formations over Cairo, Alexandria and other cities.

Each year, Egypt’s army traditionally celebrates the state holiday commemorating the October war against Israel—which eventually led to the recovery of the Sinai Peninsula through peace negotiations—with military performances and flyovers.

Egypt has been gripped by prolonged violence since the overthrow of Morsi on 3 July after mass demonstrations against his turbulent year in office.

The ouster of the former elected president, which was part of a roadmap agreed upon by many political groups and the armed forces, has enraged Islamists who have denounced the move as a violation of democratic “legitimacy.”

Hundreds were killed on 14 August when security forces moved to forcibly disperse two protest camps set up by Morsi loyalists in Cairo and Giza, unleashing days of violent turmoil and deepening polarization.

Militants elsewhere have taken up arms against the state. The army has been battling an insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula, adjoining Israel and the Palestinian Gaza Strip, where Islamist terrorists have mounted almost daily attacks on security and army targets, killing dozens.

Police in Istanbul fired water cannons and tear gas at thousands of protesters in Taksim Square.

Protesters converged on the site Saturday, blatantly disregarding warnings to stay away. Organizers said they intended to march into the adjacent park that has been cordoned off by police.

The area has been the site of anti-government protests and clashes with police since late May, when police forcefully broke up a demonstration against a government plan to develop the park for commercial use. At least three civilians and one policeman have been killed, and many more injured, during the past month.

Protesters are angry at Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has threatened to use the army to disperse demonstrations, if necessary.